


All Infected

by sasha_b



Category: Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Community: zombi_fic_ation, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 08:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1892022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sasha_b/pseuds/sasha_b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the apocalypse, we're still all infected in one way or another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Infected

**Author's Note:**

> Written for prompt 003. Any Fandom -- Any Characters -- They found a cure for the zombie virus! The downside is, the cured patients still remember everything they did while turned. Everything. (Repost round 2013 011) for community zombi-fic_ation on Live Journal.
> 
> SPOILERS for all four seasons of The Walking Dead.
> 
> All feedback is love.

You sit on the porch, outside, noise from the house reaching your ears, although you try to ignore it. The sound of the radio is grating and no matter how much you used to like it – baseball games in the summer, NPR in the morning (yeah, you liked that stupid car funny show they had) – now, it’s too much to deal with.

Summer is on the way out. It’s still warm, hot really, in the afternoons, but mornings have started to be coolish and the dew on the plants is gorgeous and you always stop and look at the rose bush that grows at the left side of the house, catty-corner to the washing room, the red blisteringly bright.

The red is the red of the blood that had been on your hands when you’d shoved the knife into Shane’s gut, and the red on Carl’s face after he’d shot your wife, his mother, in the head, moments after your daughter had been born. Red, the color of life and of the end of life, the color of the beginning and the color of a simple flower you really can’t look at, but force yourself to.

The man speaking on the radio – NPR, you laugh humorlessly – is interviewing a scientist from the CDC in Houston, the one that survived, and you think about Jenner and what he’d whispered in your ear. You wonder if it still matters.

_We’re all infected._

You can tell the ones that were healed when you go to town and look at them at the farmer’s market (the big box grocers are a thing of the past, still) or at the line for mail or riding bikes at the park – everyone’s jobs have changed, now that the plague is healed. Now that the plague is healed, things aren’t quite what they used to be.

You can tell the ones that had been sick before _walkers, don’t forget_ because their eyes are still bloodshot and white. Like the red of the rose and the white of the first snowfall of the season. Like Shane’s had been when Carl had shot him. 

You wonder if Lori’s had had the chance to turn white and monstrous.

When you catch one of their eyes in town, most of the time they look down and hustle away, carrying their produce or a book or sometimes a fistful of plastic bag, the needles that hold the antibiotic the CDC and others had come up with still necessary for those once dead to live. One shot a day, for five weeks. The first ones healed had lived a year, so far. Their skin repaired, their brains intact, their speech normal, but the eyes were a side effect the doctors and scientists couldn’t quite figure out.

The other side effect, the worst one, was the memory.

Along with the functioning of the brain came memory. Memory from before the person had been turned, which was great. But something else came with those memories, things that anyone was sure to not want to have in their head anytime ever again.

Every kill, every bite of human muscle, every bit of gristle washed down with thick, red, viscous blood, is remembered.

Every second. Every victim. Every family member destroyed physically, some of them losing their minds in the process, as they were taken apart, fleshy bit by fleshy bit.  
The bright sun is cool, and you can tell summer is on its way out.

The radio is snapped off and your son comes outside, lanky and tall and still wearing the damn Sherriff’s hat you gave him what seems like a lifetime ago. Your daughter is out back, Michonne teaching her to ride a rusted tricycle you’d traded for at the market a week ago.

You smile at Carl and he smiles back, handing you your colt .45 in its holster. His face is dappled in shadow, the trees waving in the late season breeze, and you both walk to the property line, where the woods meet the road and you think on Hershel’s farm and what you could have had there.

The memories and the eyes, those things might never go away for those that had been dead.

Most days you wake up sweating, still, even a few years on now. Lori’s voice echoing in your head, Shane’s face, the snarl on his lips, the darkness of his eyes (not white and bloodshot yet) ripping into yours even as you know what you have to do to him. 

_I killed my best friend for you people._

Carl had saved you that night, had saved you many times since, just as you’d saved him.

You gain the tree line, and without talking, line up cans and then stand next to each other, guns drawn, and then begin firing. The sun is warm but the breeze is cool and you know the fall is coming, late, but it’s around the corner and you fire, one shot after another, both of you expert marksmen and you wonder as you stop to reload and watch Carl shoot what a man he’d have made without the plague.

You swallow and don’t think about that.

You go back inside when the sun is setting and the four of you sit at the table and eat, Judith kicking her feet and laughing at the attempt you make at getting her to smile. She’s a solemn child, but you see so much of Lori in her that you know she’ll have her moments of humor and love just like she did.

Her dark eyes are Shane’s, all the same, and some nights you wish you could have been bitten too, and ended before you’d had to see what you’re seeing in Judith. But then you realize, when you see all those ‘healed’ ones in the market, or at the library, or in the park, that you’d remember everything if that had happened, and somehow that seems so very much worse than what you’re thinking of now.

You lie awake and listen to Carl snoring and Michonne softly telling Judith about the sword masters in Japan she had spent so much time learning about – and you are thankful you have the possibility you have, now.

When you dream, though, your eyes are white and bloody, and you remember _everything._


End file.
